Writing Big Ideas in planning units of work Incorporating LCS and SOLO

Embedding stuff that we want to use because we know it makes pedagogical sense, is easily said, but how do we do it cohesively?

1) Present a format that all departments can easily use to write units of work and/or schemes for the year in a predefined course.

2) Present a way of thinking and writing 'Big ideas' and then 'specific learning outcomes', followed by essential questions and a success criteria within, that allows teachers to easily digest and re-invent their own content and teaching methods as embedded within your chosen pedagogies.

How do we write nice clear Big Ideas for our students? When we break it up it's your overall Learning Outcome, the one that holds it all together and directs your 'why' (Sinek). It's 1) a noun or thing, 2) a measurement system like blooms (but why not SOLO? - http://pamhook.com/), 3) a verb that makes the noun or thing observable and therefore measurable and 4) any additional criteria that can be added to show the success for the student. I initially pulled something similar to this out of my very, very old lesson and unit planning booklet from 1999 at Christchurch College of Education, but found it more carefully explained and elaborated upon here: https://teachonline.asu.edu/2012/07/writing-measurable-learning-objectives/ 

From there, explicitly identifying LCS within the learning sequence in reference to SOLO could, in fact, come together nicely for us all.

If I play with this for myself, I often rely on "the role of the artist in understanding Pasifika patterns as a narrative..." as it feels broad enough to cover everything! But it is not very detail orientated, nor does it reference any pedagogy we are currently trying to use. If I apply this model it looks more like:

With SOLO referenced as a measurement:
The role of the Artist in using and extending a narrative with Samoan patterns in planning a painting.

With LCS referenced, specifically C:
The role of the artist in creating and extending a narrative with Samoan patterns in planning a painting

with LCS referenced, specifically L and C:
The role of the artist in activating your own understanding in creating and extending a narrative for the purposes of planning a painting using traditional Samoan patterns with a narrative

With reference to LCS:
The role of the artist; activating your own understanding of Samoan patterns in creating and extending a narrative through planning a painting for the purposes of exhibiting and explaining your story to others.

The role of the artist; - SOLO steps 1 and 2 Pre-structural and uni-structural
activating your own understanding of Samoan patterns  SOLO step 3- multi-structural
narrative through planning a painting  SOLO step 4 relational
understanding extending, Exhibiting and Explaining SOLO step 5 extend ideas

Activating - Learn

Creating, Understanding,  Extending, Through planning a painting - Create
Exhibiting and Explaining - Share new understandings

The role of the artist; activating your own understanding of Samoan patterns in creating and extending a narrative through planning a painting for the purposes of exhibiting and explaining your story to others.

From here devising your success criteria, or specific learning outcomes, flow forward nicely. the wording needs attention, but the idea of how I get there appears to work and is there. 

Learn Create Share

As an elearning leader we have spent a lot of time trying to put this in place at our school. We have been struggling with how to keep this direction straight with 50 or so staff and that whole bell curve of change with the early adopters at one end and the laggards at the other.  We want to pull together where we are and align it, but it is clear that how we have started this journey in comparison to the model we have taken on, does have more of an impact than I initially wanted to accept. This is going to lead us to change our methods of leadership and direction.

Generally, we need our structural conditions to change or at least keep pace with our changes in pedagogy in order to be absolutely effective in making lasting change to 'the way we do things around here'. We would usually expect this structural change to come from the top down - government policy would change, the flavour of the month in how we design our buildings would turn around, funding systems would be revised and statements about why, how and what we do from government analysists, hopefully, backed up by academic research would be released to support it all. There would be a good chance that a pilot programme with a healthy funding fish hook would be attached to entice schools to be ready.

The original Manaiakalani set of schools made their own structural changes, without government systems to guide them, because no one had done this before. Mutually developed and agreed upon pedagogy (LCS) at Point England School came before devices. Point England School were doing what was best for their students over what was the done thing at the time, or what was expected of low decile schools. First by introducing devices to a community who was considered by most, too poor and then providing internet infrastructure on their own to back that up. They used the devices for the pedagogy, once it was already in place. Second, by sharing the learning with their neighbouring schools, rather than using this to promote their own worth within the community. A community of learning beyond 'your own patch' in the midst of a system that sets us up to compete in the 'educational market' (tomorrow's schools) was put in place - Manaiakalani.

Then structural conditions from the top were in fact changed, based on the success of schools like Point England in Tamaki pioneering and proving this was a healthy 'way we do things around here' providing accelerated success for students who start education under the line of whatever we have decided is normal western intelligence. That point may still need some fleshing out, another time though.

We always knew we were jumping into devices without establishing the pedagogy first. We were even carefully warned that this was going to make a difference to how things progressed for us in Hornby. I clearly remember both Dorothy and Russell stating this fact in our initial presentations around Learn Create Share. Optimistically I hoped this would not matter so much because we had been warned, we'd sort it out!

So here we are, new principal from when we started with our outreach, quite a few new staff, and we are still struggling with a consistent direction for LCS. It is harder at some levels in a high school, with multiple siloed disciplines.

Having pulled together the data from our most recent staff meeting, it is clear that the confusion still lies with 'Learn'. If we substitute the word for 'Activate' or 'Ignite' (thank you Kelsey), we have it. The rest of our time is Create and Share, bouncing back to 'activate' as needed. It is fluid, not isolated. Maybe more so at a high school level due to that change from concrete to abstract thinking.

While pondering this, it occurred to me that way back in the day when I was training to be a teacher, the best advice I got about planning lessons, units and the year of learning, was to break everything into three phases that you go back over and move forward from, repeatedly; "Catch'em, Teach'em, Learn'em". It lacks the depth of pedagogy and thought possibly of LCS, and you cannot see 'share' so obviously, except that as an Art teacher, that is implied. Art is not Art if it is not shared with an audience. 'Catch' is 'activate' or 'ignite'. Excite that desire to learn, engage prior knowledge - the best part of being in a classroom so often is seeing the ignition happen. 'Teach' is providing the students with new skills and ideas to create their own work with and 'Learn' is giving them the freedom and time to be able to do exactly that. Yip, 'Share' is just not there... But it is a useful start in my own analysing and breaking down how some of us get there and some of us don't in embedding the pedagogy.

Right in amongst all of that is a part of the confusion; Learn in LCS is not the Oxford dictionary definition of Learning. Hence when you come into LCS cold, you easily confuse yourself. Likewise, if you only pay lip service to it when your school says staff meeting is LCS based, and it is not within your planning and classroom practice explicitly, you end up talking yourself around in circles.

Our next steps must be: working with individual departments to help re-direct some individual thoughts over LCS, aligning the departments in how this looks, but managing this with distributive leadership in mind.  We need to make it explicit in our way of doing things starting with planning within the department - a whole school way of managing this. We cannot rely on whole staff meetings once in a while to get that message across clearly, there is just too much to be done. Likewise, we cannot rely on outsiders coming in once in a while to 'upskill' staff, as that is not the pedagogy that is being addressed (though it is still helpful). We cannot 'do' this for everyone, it needs to develop for us to become ours and be 'the way we do things around here' long after myself and the other elearning leader have moved on. It is time to start infiltrating ourselves rather than asking politely would you like help. Nicely of course.